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Come on in to Frank’s Kitchen

Casual fine-dining is the draw at Frank's Kitchen, a year-old restaurant on College St. where silver-spoon service is offered for plastic-spoon prices. (Okay, not really, but I like how that sounds.) (SARAH DEA FOR THE TORONTO STAR)

Seafood cocktail at Frank's Kitchen marries novel presentation with the pure flavour of lobster, shrimp and crab. Cocktail sauce and lime-vodka-avocado puree are superfluous. (SARAH DEA FOR THE TORONTO STAR)

You can find it at Frank’s Kitchen, a College St. restaurant that sounds like a pizzeria but fits into its own category: Casual fine dining.

The year-old Frank’s has poise to spare. Staff make every moment of contact a joy, starting with accommodating a last-minute reservation request all the way to helping us put on our coats.

Then there are the edible grace notes: hot and cold amuse bouches, palate-cleansing sorbets and gloriously creamy truffles at the end.

I’ve been eating in casual Nonna-style restaurants for so many months, I’d forgotten these niceties. They make an ordinary mid-week dinner seem like a special occasion.

Frank’s tries to boost the standards of a casual neighbourhood place, and succeeds.

Husband-and-wife owners Frank Parhizgar, 34, and Shawn Cooper, 42, worked in fine-dining restaurants, him in the kitchen at Centro and her in management at the Platinum Club.

Their self-stated perfectionism is apparent in the details, from the monogrammed leather bill folds to the muslin-wrapped lemon halves served with fish.

“They’re no big deal, these little things, opening the door to the bathroom for guests and putting on their coats. I don’t know why they can’t be done more,” says Cooper.

For my part, I don’t know why more chefs can’t pour Chianti into a bread mixer, like Parhizgar, to make dark and delicious loaves.

The Chianti loaf (or the baby brioche, or the mini-focaccia served with killer green-olive tapenade) will be one of the first things you taste in the low-key room of exposed brick, vintage fixtures and floral art.

Next will be a refined amuse bouche: shot glasses of puréed potato-leek soup dotted with basil oil, say, or finely diced Mideast salad topped with the tiniest goat cheese croquette.

You will be handled by practiced wait staff with full menu knowledge, who let you sample the Les Jamelles Viognier ($11 a glass) before committing. (The short wine list will soon expand, Cooper later says.)

If you sit in the back of the long, narrow room, you will see into the tiny kitchen. Watch Parhizgar work, his glossy black ponytail bound by multiple elastics. Hear him cuss.

“We’re short two cooks,” Cooper explains.

“The food will still be delicious but it’ll take a little bit longer.”

Then there’s the reimagined seafood cocktail ($15) served on a block of seaweed-embedded ice wrapped in glossy banana leaves. It tastes as striking as it looks, the morsels of lobster, shrimp and crab tender and translucent. Their purity of flavour obviates the cocktail sauce and lime-avocado purée alongside.

By this point in the meal, it’s clear Parhizgar knows what he’s doing. That’s why it’s disappointing to find an anemic caprese-type salad ($14) in winter.

Parhizgar should also know better than to overdo the gorgonzola on crisped gnocchi ($16); the cheese quickly becomes as tiring as a loud dinner party guest. And if he reined in the lemon and bacon on his old-school oysters Rockerfeller ($14 for six), we could taste the oysters better.

Case in point: Milk-fed pork ($25) and lamb ($28) from St. Jacobs, Ont., served three ways. The pork chops are beautifully tender, but the belly is flabby. Similarly, the lamb rack is expertly timed but the braised shoulder is dry.

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